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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus began as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par